Statement
of PurposeThe organizing
group for Consumers, Commodities and Consumption seeks to foster dialogue
and debate among those who are interested in and concerned about the place
of goods and commodities in social life. These interests and concerns
may range from the poetics of micro/personal identity formation to the
identity politics of gendered, raced and classed display, from historical
work on the rise of consumer culture to a critique of Nike advertising,
from investigations of typical places of consumption to the study the
dynamics of globalization and urban areas. Individuals affiliated with
Consumers, Commodities and Consumption desire to bring to the fore, in
their own ways, the depths to which commodities and a market logic have
come to pervade virtually all forms of social life and social interaction.
The primary goal is to begin to engage in an interchange.

Contact
the CCC:Contact
the Consumers, Commodities and Consumption Special Interest Group at the
American Sociological Association.

Walking to our next
interview in a neighborhood near the West Station in Guangzhou, we came
into a dark, narrow passage between high-rise buildings that looked like
public housing, where we could see four old people playing mahjongg. The
apartments were linked by an apparent tangle of electric wires. The windows
were all protected by wrought iron bars. Most of the balconies were decorated
with flowers. Clothes were drying on long sticks outside the windows.
Nothing very conspicuous at first glance. No exotic vision of China. Only
the ordinary course of daily life could be seen.

If you want to catch
a glimpse of the gears of capitalism grinding away in America today, you
don't need to go to a factory or a business office.

Instead, observe
a child and parent in a store. That high-pitched whining you'll hear coming
from the cereal aisle is more than just the pleadings of a single kid
bent on getting a box of Fruit Loops into the shopping cart. It is the
sound of thousands of hours of market research, of an immense coordination
of people, ideas and resources, of decades of social and economic change
all rolled into a single, "Mommy, pleeease!"

The Berkeley
Journal of Sociology (BJS) invites submissions of well-researched,
theoretically interesting papers on issues relating to consumption for
Volume 49, 2005. We are particularly interested in research that explores
perspectives on consumption as a social experience and consumers as social
actors.